Our December 15th meetup is going to be a bit different!

We are co-organizing an event with a number of local user groups (SF-Java, SF-PHP, and SF-.NET) on something that truly crosses the technology boundaries: agile software development :-)

I'll start off the evening by giving a brief overview of Scrum, an iterative incremental framework for managing complex work (such as new product development), commonly used with Agile - just so that we are all on the same page.

We will then hear a story from the trenches of what exactly it means to "go Agile" by the folks from Genius.com - yes, the smart bunch from our last event with Jens Østergaard on Why is Scrum So Hard.

The hardest part of going Agile is the initial rollout of a new way of working. Whether it's getting executive buy-in, overcoming team skepticism, serially prioritizing work, instilling cross-functional collaboration, or learning just-in-time design and incremental development, embracing Agile can be a daunting task. In this session, Genius.com will share what made their rollout successful and what lessons they learned along the way.

They will cover what Genius.com was like before rolling out Agile, what their rollout looked like, what they've tuned as they've gone along, and what their process currently looks like (including our split into two development teams).

Special thanks goes to Michael Tougeron from the SF-PHP group and Bruno Terkaly from Microsoft for making this event happen!

We are still confirming the sponsors for this meetup, but it's safe to say that there will be plenty of drinks, pizza, and swag :-)

More details for follow!

Please note that this event will be hosted at SF-Microsoft, 835 Market St (@4th) on the 7th floor.

About Ryan Ausanka-Crues, Development Manager
Ryan Ausanka-Crues is the Development Manager at Genius.com with responsibility over development, QA, and build/release. Ryan began at Genius.com in 2006 as a developer and championed the transition to Agile as Lead Developer. In his two and a half years of leadership, the development team at Genius.com has built four products over 21 major releases.

About Scott Mersy, Vice President of Marketing & Products
As Vice President of Marketing & Products, Mersy leads the company's marketing strategy, awareness, demand generation, and product efforts. Scott has been with Genius since the company got started in early 2005, working with co-founders Robert Seidl and David Thompson to develop and launch the initial SalesGenius product in 2006. Since then, Scott has worked closely with colleagues in marketing and engineering to define and launch 5 products in 3 years, contributing to 200% year over year growth at Genius.com in 2008. In 2007, Scott helped introduce the Agile/Scrum methodology at Genius.com.

About Drew Stephens, Vice President of Fonts & Colors
A native Zimbabwean, Drew joined Genius.com in 2008. Now the Vice President of Fonts & Colors, Drew fills the roll of ScrumMaster for the development team and chromatically organizes tasks to foster Scrum board synergy and ensure optimal leverage of the digital value chain.

About Marko Gargenta
Since 2001, as an instructor at Marakana Inc., Marko has been designing and delivering courses on such topics as Core/Advanced Java, Java 5, Servlet and JSP Development on Tomcat, and J2EE Development on JBoss to clients such as Xerox, Sun Microsystems, and the U.S. Government.

In 2006 Marko Gargenta published “PHP and MySQL By Example”, a 900+ page book on PHP code examples. The book was published by Prentice Hall – world’s largest technology publisher and has been also translated to Spanish.

Marko Gargenta obtained his Bachelor of Mathematics Degree from University of Waterloo (Canada's MIT) and has been developing in Java since 1996.

About Genius.com
Genius.com is the leading provider of software that enables marketing and sales users to quickly identify and connect with their best prospects. Genius.com has over 500 corporate customers who use Genius' SaaS applications to automate marketing campaigns that use real-time prospect behavior to identify the most qualified leads and deliver them immediately to their sales reps.

As usual, this event is brought to you by Marakana, which also happens to offer Agile and Scrum training :-)